Rain, Rain Go Away...

Here is a little poem that I composed myself...

Rain, rain go away,

Please don't come another day

I don't like rainy days

Rain, rain go away.

Actually, I do like the rain. However, not at six o clock in the morning in the unreasonable cold. Especially when the road is frozen over and you are trying to walk uphill to the bus stop and you're already late. Not that it happened to me this morning or anything...

This post is about

Silver!!

In the summer I LOVE the rain. Like, a lot. My favorite thing to do is to put some old clothes on and go run around in it.

Yes, that is me and
yes, I am dancing and
yes, it is raining.

In the winter it is not very welcome. It makes the snow gross and melty, and to top it off it is really, really, cold. (especially at the ungodly hour of the morning that I am required to get up at)

There is something wrong with this picture...
Photo Courtesy of Panoramio

Despite all of the obvious downsides, I actually enjoy my morning walks. (but only when an imaginary kidnapper isn't following me.) 

I love my morning walks because I get to see the stars and the silver moon.  Most days the moon is so bright that I don't even need a flashlight to walk to the bus! It is really nice to have something pretty to look at.

In case you didn't know stargazing is one of my favorite pastimes. I just think that stars are so pretty!

Aren't they just gorgeous???
Photo Courtesy of Higher Perspective

Shooting stars are, of course, my favorite. No matter how times I see it, I still don't ever get tired of them.

One time we were camping  and it was really warm out so we left the tent coverings off. My mom and I couldn't sleep so we stayed up watching the stars.

I started to wonder, if there are so many stars in the universe which ones can we see?  It turns out that this very night you can go out and see lots of famous and cool things, not just stars.

For example, tonight you can see not only many famous constellations such as the Big Dipper, but you can also see a planet! That's right tonight the planet Jupiter is visible from Utah (don't worry I looked this up).  Other cool stuff you can see includes the Andromeda Galaxy

Does this picture look familiar or is that just me??
Photo Courtesy of Wiki

Also visible are many star clusters and large stars, such as the Pleiades aka. the Seven Sisters

Seven Sisters? More like ten million!
Photo Courtesy of Starry Skies

Well this post was supposed to be about rain, that was kind of a bust. I am too lazy to change the title. And for my three readers, hopefully I inspired you to do some stargazing in the near future!

A Warrior's World

Red

I might be going to Africa this summer!
Several summers ago my parents went to Kenya to do volunteer work.

Elders of the Maasai tribe

This summer my mom is thinking about taking me there, to work in an orphanage. She started telling me about the things that they did and saw while they were there. I looked up some things to help me get a better idea of what it was going to be like. Red is a color for Kenya.




The Maasai people are a classic symbol of Africa. This is largely due to the fact that they have worked hard to keep their culture free of influence from the Western world. The Maasai warriors in particular continue to hunt and do their tribal rituals.

Maasai Warriors doing a tribal dance
Photo and information above and below courtesy of Kenya Information

The Maasai still wear tribal clothes of red cloth and many beads and pieces of jewelry. They also still perform special rituals, rites of passage, live in traditional houses, and farm and hunt their own food.

Children in front of their house

My parents got a chance to meet the Maasai people, learn about their culture, and to spend time with them while they were in Africa. 

Children in the Mission School courtyard

But red isn't only for the Maasai...

My mom worked in a school in Nakuru, Kenya, sponsored by an American organization called Kenya Partners.  There, she and a group of doctors and health care workers were able to work and spend time with kids and teachers.  

While she was there she worked with kids who have health issues, but also other stuff like anxiety.  She also spent a lot of time teaching the teachers, how to counsel and help the kids, how to recognize problems earlier, and about discipline methods that don't involve caning children. 

Squatter's Hill Preschool

Preschooler in her red school uniform

The school is home to about 700 kids, many of them orphans.  It is where I will be working if we go. It is an interesting place where the children are well cared for, happy, and grateful for all they get. There is a preschool, a grade school, and a high school at the school, and another preschool in the poor part of the city of Nakuru, called Squatter's Hill.  I get to help in the preschool, and work with the kids, while my mom is working with the teachers.  

Kenya Partners also has a health clinic I can work in if I want to.  It is where my dad worked in while he was there.  He spent his time in the clinic developing tests to see if people had diseases, then he tested methods with the patients seen there. The clinic is where the people in the community go if they are sick or hurt. It has a dirt floor except for in the exam rooms, windows but no glass, limited electricity, temporary waiting areas, and is very crowded. If I go, I won't be doing anything exciting, just checking people in, holding babies, and making them more comfortable.

The possibility of going to Kenya is really exciting. I love the idea of helping people, especially little kids.  I think I might want to do work for a service organization when I am older and I hope this trip will help me better understand what that would be like.  I actually was first inspired to go on a service trip by the movie Soul Surfer. As silly as it sounds, the part during the movie when the main character is playing with the little boy in the water and helping him trust it again after the tsunami made me realize that maybe I wanted to do something like that.

Thinking of taking on such a big journey makes me realize that I am also really quite nervous about even going.  It seems like the Maasai and the children I would be working with have lives that are so different from ours.  They are orphans and most own only their clothes and school supplies.  They don't always have a place to go when school is out and they only have a hope that with education they can have a better life.  According to my mother it is a very difficult place to go because it is hard to see that some people have so little when we have so much. It's also beautiful to see that people can thrive and be happy with what they have.

I have to admit, one of the cool things about working with Kenya Partners is that they say thank you to volunteers by taking them on a safari for their last day in Kenya.  We may go to a Maasai village and national park in the Maasai Mara, or stay in Nakuru.  I'm pretty sure I don't care where I go, because it should be amazing!  There are no "red" animals, but lots of beautiful ones like rhinos, elephants, and giraffes.

I am really hopeful that I will get to go to Kenya.  I really want to learn from the experience. I love kids more than anything. I hope that I have something to offer them too. I get to explore a new country, and new continent, and a new culture.
It will be a Red Letter Day.

Winter, Water, and Whales

Maybe I should have included this part of my trip in my last post because there was an awful lot of sand. I didn't, so here it is...


GREY

After our adventures in Death Valley my family and I drove up the coast into Oregon.  We rented a beach house in a place called Brookings. It was beautiful because the house was on the corner of a river and the ocean.

The front porch of our house

Since it is winter, most of the time we were there the landscape was quite grey and cold. When we walked down to the beach, the water was grey. When you looked at the sky, it was grey.

One day we were on a beach that was a short drive from our house. As I was looking out at the ocean I saw a large spray of water far off in the distance. For a second I thought I was going crazy, but then I saw another one. When another one came up I pointed it out to my family. Soon we realized that these were whale spouts.

This was totally worth the cold and windy walk.  We were soon off, looking for a better place to see the spouts more clearly. When we reached a parking lot on top of a cliff we stopped, only to find that it was already occupied with several people armed with binoculars and very heavy duty cameras. They told us that the whales that we were seeing were grey whales.

Watching Whales at Harris Beach State Park

We sat up there with them for hours. Whenever a whale came up everyone would cheer a little. I wish I could have taken a picture of them, but they were too far away for our camera.  However, I can describe what I saw through binoculars, because it was really incredible.

As well as a spout, the whale crests the water, so you see his back skimming the water.  If you are lucky, he jumps a little and then a tail comes flipping out of the water to splash down. This scene played out once or twice every fifteen minutes and the rest of the time we stared at the horizon, looking for more.

Breaching Whale
Photo Courtesy of Rogue River

The next day we decided to try another place that was even higher up. To get to this one you had to hike out a bit.  The whales were there again!

I received a pamphlet from one of the ladies at the first place telling me about migration patterns of whales and such.

I found that the whales can be seen on the coast of Oregon almost all year round.  They feed in Oregon and Alaska in the summer and fall. In early December the entire grey whale population goes south to Mexico and southern California.  Migration reaches its peak around the first week in January (that is when we were there).  Then around late February they start heading back up to Oregon and Alaska again.

Around another corner there seemed to be another surprise. As we were walking we heard a noise, it sounded like a strange mix of someone laughing and a dog barking.

The famous Harris Beach sea lions
Photo Courtesy of Harris Beach State Park

We looked out towards the water and couldn't see anything except for some rocks. We took out our binoculars and looked again. There was one rock that had a couple dozen things on it that looked suspiciously like logs, except they were moving. I realized that we had found the beach's famous sea lions! We walked over a hill and the sea lions were so loud that I could still hear them all of the way back to the car!

It was so cool to walk up and down the beach watching the grey whales, in the grey water, under a grey sky.

Beach at Harris State Park